The eye of the tagga » Developer

The shiny new tagga SMS API

Chris — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:02:20 +0000

Big news from tagga, we released a free SMS messaging API this week! The tagga API lets developers send SMS text messages to their users, receive SMS text messages from their users, create taggs, and dynamically update taggs. See below for an overview of our API features:

Send Message - Learn More
The Send Message API function lets developers send free SMS text messages to mobile users via a simple HTTP POST. Developers can only send to users who have opted into the developers program.

Dynamic tagg Update - Learn More
The Dynamic Update API function lets developers update the message content of any tagg on the fly. This function is particularly useful when used to update Newsletter taggs, which updates all subscribers when the Newsletter content is changed.

Create tagg - Learn More
The Create tagg API function lets developers automatically create taggs and mobile websites without visiting tagga.com. This feature is particularly useful for sites with groups of users who want to create Newsletter taggs that send updates to all users in a group. This feature will also be attractive to listing sites seeking to mobilize via SMS campaigns and mobile websites.

Two Way Messaging - Learn More
The Two Way Messaging API platform will allow developers to receive messages from their users and respond accordingly, for free. Developers will receive an HTTP POST from us when their users send a message to their keyword; the developer can then dynamically decide what content to return to the user. The tagga API provides developers with tools to send and receive SMS messages to and from their users.

Check out all the details and sign up for the API!

Note that the API is only free to developers and that standard messaging rates apply to SMS recipients.

If our API doesn’t tickle your fancy you might be interested in some of our other developer tools, check them out on our Developer page.

Please contact us with any questions or suggestions and feel free to send us links to your apps. We’d love to see the tagga API in action!

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

The shiny new tagga SMS API Big news from tagga, we released a free SMS messagi

Talk by Jason Fried of 37signals

Chris — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:13:23 +0000

I have long been a fan of 37signals and the mantras they share in their book Getting Real. This talk by 37signals founder Jason Fried highlights some of their great ideas concerning work in the software development industry. In my estimation, watching it is well worth an hour of your time:

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Talk by Jason Fried of 37signals I have long been a fan of 37signals and the ma

Tagga Send to Mobile MovableType Plugin

Chris — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:32:53 +0000

Our new ‘Send to Mobile’ MovableType Plugin was recently added to the MovableType Plugins directory. The ‘Send to Mobile’ Plugin adds a tagga “Send to Mobile” button to the end of each post or page. Users wanting to send the post or page content to their mobile device can click on the button to do so. For an example of the plugin in action, check out the ‘Send to Mobile’ button at the bottom of this post. Note that we are using the Wordpress version on our blog, but that the MovableType Plugin works in the same way. Check out our Tools Page for more information.

To install the ‘Send to Mobile’ MovableType Plugin:

1. Download the MoveableType Plugin.
2. Unzip the entire folder to “[MT cgi-bin install dir]/plugins”.
3. Go to administration and edit the Entry template by adding <$MTTaggaSendToMobile$> after the tag.
4. Go to administration and edit the Entry Summary template by adding <$MTTaggaSendToMobile$> after the tag.
5. Edit Html Head template by adding <$MTTaggaHeadJS$> inside the tag.
6. Click the “refresh” button at the top of the administration page in order to save and publish the changes

We hope you’ll give it a try. Feel free to let us know if you have any questions.

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Tagga Send to Mobile MovableType Plugin Our new ‘Send to Mobile’ MovableTyp

Tagga Send to Mobile Wordpress Plugin

Chris — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:22:56 +0000

Our new ‘Send to Mobile’ WordPress Plugin was recently accepted into the WordPress Plugins directory. We’ve already had 64 downloads, which is great to see! What the ‘Send to Mobile’ Plugin does is add a tagga “Send to Mobile” button to the end of each post or page. Users wanting to send the post or page content to their mobile device can click on the button to do so. For an example of the plugin in action, check out the ‘Send to Mobile’ button at the bottom of this post. Check out our Tools Page for more information.

To install the ‘Send to Mobile’ WordPress Plugin:

1. Download the Wordpress Plugin.
2. Unzip file into /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
3. Go to wp-admin panel of your WordPress site and click on “Plugins”.
4. Activate plugin “Tagga - send to mobile” by clicking “Activate”.

It’s as easy as that.

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Tagga Send to Mobile Wordpress Plugin Our new ‘Send to Mobile’ WordPress Pl

Tagga ‘Send to Mobile’ Joomla Extension

Chris — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:32:33 +0000

Our new ‘Send to Mobile’ Joomla Extension was accepted into the Joomla Extensions directory today. We’ve already received some positive votes and favorites, which is good to see! What the ‘Send to Mobile’ Joomla Extension does is add a tagga “Send to Mobile” button to the end of each entry. Users wanting to send the page content to their mobile device can click on the button to do so. For an example, check out the button at the bottom of this post (we are using the WordPress version). Check out our Tools Page for more information.

To install the ‘Send to Mobile’ Joomla Extension:

1. In Joomla administrator, go to Extensions -> install/uninstall.

2. In “install from URL”, insert “http://www.tagga.com/plugins/taggastm.joomla.1.5.1.zip” and click “Install”. You may see an error saying “XML Parsing Error at 1:1. Error 4: Empty document”. Do not worry if it happens, the plugin will still work.

3. Go to Extensions -> plugin manager, look for “Content - Tagga send to mobile” and activate it.

It’s as easy as that.

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Tagga ‘Send to Mobile’ Joomla Extension Our new 'Send to Mobile' Jo

Site Update and New Publisher Tools

Chris — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:56:56 +0000

We recently started a more formal release process at tagga and today was our first “release”. We had previously just been pushing updates to our production servers as we saw fit, which the dev crowd will know is pretty dangerous. We let dev go on a bit longer than we wanted, but release was smooth nonetheless and the culmination of our last three weeks effort is now publicly available.

What publishers will find most appealing is our new set of ‘Send to Mobile’ plugins for the most popular blogging and CMS platforms out there. We have plugins available for WordPress, MovableType, Joomla, and Drupal. For an example of the WordPress plugin, look for the ‘Send to Mobile’ button at the bottom of this post. Check out the new plugins on our Tools Page.

We’ve also altered our text message content to contain a small tagg url. Now all message receivers have the ability to open a mobile formatted web page for more information on the tagg they are requesting. We think that advertisers will enjoy the opportunity to provide more detailed information above and beyond the content of their free SMS text message. Feel free to make your own free tagg (now with mobile website included) on the Create Page.

Please let us know what you think of our recent changes and feel free to let us know if any bugs found themselves uncaught.

Cheers,

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Site Update and New Publisher Tools We recently started a more formal release p

Google Webmaster Tools - Sitemaps

Chris — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:07:24 +0000

I have recently been playing around with Google Webmaster Tools and learning a lot about what they can do. One great feature they offer is the ability to upload sitemaps of pages for indexing that their bots might not otherwise find. At tagga, every tagg has its own URL, for example my personal tagg has the URL chris.tagga.com. Google might not find all of our taggs by crawling our site, so I’ve written a function that creates an XML sitemap entry for every tagg. I made our sitemap publicly available, told the google bots where to find it, and added a crontab entry to regenerate our sitemap every night. By doing this, I’m hoping that more of our taggs show up in google search results, leading to more traffic at tagga.com.

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Google Webmaster Tools - Sitemaps I have recently been playing around with Goog

Internet Explorer 6 not supported, try Firefox

Chris — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 01:01:17 +0000

We at tagga decided not to support Internet Explorer 6 because of the headache it would have caused us to customize our code (namely css and JavaScript) specifically for it. We had enough trouble with IE7 as it was… Indeed, there are a great deal of CSS bugs related specifically to the internet explorer family.

Many websites are starting to pull support for IE6, which remains a controversial decision seeing as estimates show a quarter of the internet are still using it. It wasn’t a hard decision for us though, the troubles supporting IE6 would have caused were just not worth it. You might call us lazy, but we think we are doing our users a favor by recommending Firefox3:) Also, not many early adopters use IE6, preferring the latest technology.

I apologize to any IE6 users who have come across tagga and had difficulties. To you I recommend Firefox3, which I think you will enjoy.

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Internet Explorer 6 not supported, try Firefox We at tagga decided not to suppo

A web app in four days for $10k

Chris — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 23:00:37 +0000

Techcrunch posted this guest article recently, it was written by Ryan Carson, the founder of Carsonified and it details his team’s quest to build a web app in four days for only $10000. I learned a few things about working efficiently while reading this article. I think they had a great approach and I would love to incorporate some of their thoughts into what we do at tagga.

Chris Richardson
tagga developer

A web app in four days for $10k Techcrunch posted this guest article recently,

SMS Aggregators

Chris — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 19:30:16 +0000

At tagga, we use a number of aggregators for SMS delivery throughout the world. Use of an aggregator is pretty much a requirement. They’ve already done the legwork of interfacing with the mobile service providers, a difficult and trying task. In the beginning, we were looking for the perfect aggregator. The perfect aggregator would have had good prices, a good api, great coverage, and a good web interface for account management. The perfect aggregator does not exist and not one that I have seen comes even close. To get the coverage we needed around the world, we’ve had to go with three aggregators, those being Clickatell, mBlox, and txtNation. It’s been tasking managing three separate interfaces for the same function and we’ve put a lot of hard work into that.

All three aggregators we use do something well and other things quite poorly. None of the three have quality support and only Clickatell has a decent web interface. I believe there is a substantial market opportunity out there for new SMS aggregators. I’d recommend starting small and focusing on getting complete coverage of one country at a time. I’d recommend building a simple API and a simple web interface that both do what the customer really needs them to do. Most importantly, I’d recommend they create quality documentation and offer excellent support. As long as the service works at a reasonable price, less is more.

If anyone knows of a good quality SMS aggregator, we’d love to hear about it.

Chris Richardson
tagga developer

SMS Aggregators At tagga, we use a number of aggregators for SMS delivery throu